[132] In National Life and Character, a pessimistic though intellectually stimulating book.
[133] Provident Societies, by Sidney Webb, and The London Population, by D. Heron.
[134] It must be recognised also that in Great Britain emigration has, during the last three centuries, tended in all probability in the same direction as the various forms of social selection—namely, to the deterioration of the home population; for in all ages it is the bold and enterprising persons who seek new homes in far countries, leaving the weakly, the timid, the dull, and the defective behind in the mother country. Even the convicts that we exported at one time to our colonies were probably persons of more than average capacity, though some of them may have been innately defective in moral disposition.
[135] Études sur la sélection chez l’homme. Paris, 1904.
[136] England and the English.
[137] Notably by Prof. Flinders Petrie in his Revolutions of Civilisation.
[138] Op. cit. p. 407.
[139] De Laponge does not stand alone in this opinion. Many biologists and leaders of thought have expressed it hardly less strongly, though not all of them have attached so much importance to the influence of the towns. It has been expressed in general terms by Dr and Mrs Whetham (in the Hibbert Journal for Oct. 1911), by Dean Inge in a number of forcible articles, by Mr W. Bateson in his ‘Herbert Spencer Lecture’ for 1912, and by other writers in a number of articles in the Eugenics Review and other journals.
[140] This conclusion may perhaps be said to be now generally accepted by those who have given any thought to the matter. A. R. Wallace argued strongly in this sense; the late Benjamin Kidd set out the evidence impressively in his Social Evolution, Chapter IX; and it is implied by all the many writers who, as we have noted, agree in regarding the processes of selection in the civilised nations as in the main reversed or detrimental.
[141] I refer the reader to my Social Psychology.